Moving past “Systematics Wars”

Beckett Sterner, Arizona State University, and Scott Lidgard, Field Museum of Natural History, have written a new interpretation of a critical period in evolutionary biology leading to how scientists classify organisms: the “Systematics Wars” of the late 1960’s through the 1980’s.

Beckett Sterner (left) and Scott Lidgard (right)

This was a time when prominent biological systematists fought bitterly along partisan lines. They critique philosopher David Hull’s historical account in Science as a Process, which began what later became the common view that one camp, cladistics, straightforwardly “won” over another camp, phenetics.

Hull prioritized theory over practice and the conflicts of a few leading theorists over the less polarized interactions of systematists at large. He treated cultural evolution and biological evolution as forms of the same general process; cladistics and phenetics as holistically opposed theories can only interact by competition to the death.

Sterner and Lidgard instead analyze what systematists actually did in this period, the workflow that they followed, the methods they used, and the common problems that arose and were solved to the benefit of both camps.

They hope this opens a new window of different perspectives on how we classify organisms—the mathematization of systematics.